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Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

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Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#831

Post by idopmstuff »

selimthegrim wrote: post #807
idopmstuff wrote: post #230

Two of them: 1. ChatGPT 3.5 wrote me a script to pull some data out of Shopify and write it to a Google Sheet. Nothing remotely impressive by today's standards, but I had just commanded a computer to write code in plain English and it worked! 2. I own a bunch of e-comm brands, and with every new image model I tried to get product photography. Nothing worked until Nano Banana Pro, when suddenly I gave it a crappy iPho…

How does it do for 360 degree photos/Gaussian splatting type stuff

For the most part if you give it sample photos that have sufficient coverage of different angles, it's very good at faithfully reconstructing the product from whatever angle you choose.

The one exception I've encountered is baby mobiles. It really does not understand the physics there.

Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#832

Post by jpollock »

Yesterday. I was reviewing for an exam and came across a bug in the profs text. I took a screen shot pasted it in the prompt and asked. It initially agreed with the Prof, then checked it's work, revised and agreed with me, all while showing the work it did.

I was able to see why it got confused at the start, attempt to confirm, fail, and then calculate from the data and come to the opposite conclusion.

Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#833

Post by plagasul »

ulrashida wrote: post #822
plagasul wrote: post #654

Several. Yesterday a friend with no prior coding experience or knowledge showed me an app he initially built to help him study for public administration job positions. The exams for this positions are public (spain), but the tools are scarce, expensive or he did not like. So he used lovable, then switched to web gemini and claude, then paid claude. He now has +130 very active users on an initial free tier, while he f…

Do your students know their feedback is AI generated? A pre-AI example from the military : course reviews and performance assessments were changes to be from a set of about 70 descriptors instead of written custom. Instructors could modify them, but many didn't or did so only trivially. The system was junked in within three years because of the obvious: those giving feedback didn't own it, and those receiving feedbac…

Feedback is not AI generated, just structured grammar corrected and pasted at the right spot. I then review the output to see if it remains within what I meant to convey with my feedback. This is relatively simple feedback, I have 'highlight' and 'to improve' fieldsm, with a few sentences in each, very focused. If the feedback felt depersonalized or its meaning or tone changed I would fix it or not use this method. For longer forms of feedback it may not work.

Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#834

Post by g42gregory »

Today, when I talked to AT&T “Andi” Charbot.

It was so atrocious, the ELIZA program we built in Stanford NLP class 20+ yrs ago would have been better.

It was “oh shit”, these trillion dollar AI companies are going down 9 months from now and taking the market down with them.

Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#835

Post by ozim »

ezconnect wrote: post #586
mattmanser wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With stuff like this, do you honestly not feel that you've probably been tricked and that someone else actually did this? Don't get me wrong, I think AI can do some surprising things, but with stuff like this, often it just stole the code and the steps without attribution, it didn't figure it out. There'll probably be a blog post detailing exactly how to do this somewhere and Claude just copied the steps and code. An…

It was probably done on a foreign language on an archived forum. Claude is the improvement of the internet search box.

I take it….

Improvement over all the assholes that tell you „just google it” after you spent two days hitting the wall.

Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#836

Post by MillionOClock »

I was working with very small local models (<= 4B ones) in my app, there was a point where the response of the model seemed so good I really had to double check I wasn't mistakenly using a cloud model. The model hadn't made tool calls or anything, but its textual answer quality was high enough that it made me hesitate. A different kind of impressive vs the frontier models, but still was a bit of a wow moment when I remember expensive hosted models having a hard time writing proper English.

Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#837

Post by dalemhurley »

> Then ChatGPT hit the scene and again, many of us dismissed it as a parlor trick that would never amount to much.

What? GPT-3.5 was the moment, not a “parlor[sic] trick that would never amount to much”.

GPT-3.5 was a massive step forward. LLMs were suddenly good and produced meaningful content.

I was extremely early to the agentic stage and had it looping and was dealing with the 4k context issues.

Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

#838

Post by chiph »

llbbdd wrote: post #247
buckle8017 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gemini almost killed you. The exhaust blower not working triggered a safety that prevented the furnace from firing. Spinning it bypassed the safety. You likely inhaled a lot more carbon monoxide than you know.

Can you elaborate? I interpreted the same as the other comment that the blower fan just needed a hand start and kept going after the furnace started up. What you're saying only makes sense to me if the spinning the fan by hand allowed the furnace to start by bypassing the safety at startup, but wouldn't that mean that if the exhaust fan was stopped during normal operation (blockage etc) that the furnace would just ke…

Gas heat uses two fans - one to blow air to the rooms (often shared with an A/C system), and another smaller one[1] to supply air to the gas burners and the heat exchanger. As part of the safety system, the computer won't open the gas valve and ignite the burners until it knows there is airflow from the small fan.

When GP spun the fan it fooled the computer into thinking it was running and continuing the ignition sequence. It may be that once the burners got everything hot there was enough airflow from the thermals so they didn't have a buildup of CO. Or were just lucky.

[1] The motor is usually generic but has a proprietary bracket, which was a $1500 lesson last year

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